Imperial Theater
Walk down Hamburg's Reeperbahn in St. Pauli and you pass the Imperial Theater, a theatre that grew out of a cinema. Inside wait 277 seats, a stage and a programme running from musicals to crime plays.
The building opened in 1956 as a non-stop newsreel cinema and turned into a programme cinema a year later. In 1963 it briefly ran as the Cinemarium, a cinema with a 360-degree screen. The seventies and eighties turned it into a sex cinema. That run ended on 19 August 1994, when the doors first opened on a theatre. Early seasons brought musicals such as Grease and The Rocky Horror Show, plus Christmas productions like The Wizard of Oz and Cinderella.
Crime took over the programme on 15 March 2003, and the nickname Hamburg's Crime Theater stuck. Adaptations of Edgar Wallace novels such as The Indian Scarf and The Avenger share the bill with Agatha Christie and Alfred Hitchcock. The stage also welcomes guests: the Reeperbahn Festival brings musicians and authors from around the world. A second stage, the Crime Salon, sits in the Maritim Hotel Reichshof. There you order a meal while the action unfolds between the tables.
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